Poll on internal disclosure of author statistics

The statistics compiled by RePEc are used for various rankings, for example for authors. While we still consider these statistics to be experimental, in particular those pertaining to citations, these numbers are increasingly used for evaluation purposes. We value the privacy of authors and only disclose the statistics for the top ranked ones. Authors get each month a link to their statistics, a link with a code valid only for a month. This avoids a link that may have been disclosed once to be visible forever.

We get more a more requests from department heads to obtain the data for members of their department. Our typical response is to have them ask directly the members of their department to forward them their monthly RePEc emails. But of course, we could also provide directly all the relevant information. The purpose of this poll is to see whether participants in RePEc would favor such a disclosure. The conditions would be:

The request must come directly from the head of the relevant department, by email to Christian Zimmermann

The request contains a link allowing to verify that this person is indeed head.

Statistics would be disclosed only for the members of the department who are currently affiliated with the department, as indicated in their RePEc profiles.

Those with invalid email addresses would be excluded from the analysis, under the presumption that their affiliation may not be current.

The department head would be provided with a link containing the analysis, a link that expires with the next monthly update of the rankings.

If you have an opinion about thus please vote below and/or offer a comment. Given the nature of the question, we would require significant more than a majority (two thirds) to offer this service. The poll closes on February 21, 2010.

Update (22/2/2010): This poll is now closed. There was little interest, with only 89 votes, which fell 52-37 in favor of the disclosure. With an approval rate of 58%, it fell short of what I consider a substantial majority for an implementation. Thus, there will be no disclosure to department heads.

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